


sing me that old song again

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2011 [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural
Genre: Angels, Angst and Humor, Apocalypse, Birthday, F/M, Gen, Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:39:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is ending. Enter reluctant Buffy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sing me that old song again

**Author's Note:**

> **Prompt/Prompter:** Supernatural/Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy/Castiel.  
>  _She turns fifty in a bar exactly like the one she turned thirty in, looking like she's still eighteen._ \- for open_summer
> 
> The pairing didn’t quite make it beyond subtext because, well, angel, but I would like you to know that behind the scenes, those two are naughty bunnies. Really.

+

She turns fifty in a bar exactly like the one she turned thirty in, looking like she’s still eighteen. Twenty, actually, twenty is how old she was when she died.

Twenty is as old as she’ll ever be.

But she’s always looked far too young, all smooth, golden skin and bright eyes.

They’re not bright anymore.

Forty-five. She remembers forty-five. There was no bar then, only a smelly sewer in China and a horde of vicious, man-eating demons. She remembers thirty-five, too, which was spent naked in bed with a man who whispered lies in her ear before he tried to kill her with her own knife. She’ll never forget the look on his face as she pulled the knife out of her gut and returned the favor, stabbing deep.

All in all, she thinks, staring deeply into her beer, life’s sort of shitty and there’s no end in sight. Not ever.

Dawn called earlier today, asked her to drop by. A three hour drive would do the trick. And then? Dawn’s husband is normal. He doesn’t know about demons and gods and unaging, immortal sisters. Dawn would introduce her as her niece and Buffy can’t… she can’t stand that.

She can’t hear that lie from her sister’s lips, because it’ll take away what little’s left of her, of who she is. Used to be. Buffy Anne Summers, vampire slayer. Immortal. Freak of nature. The bitch who won’t stay dead.

Su-Ann extended an invitation, too, but she knows the young girl is intimidated by her. She’s the slayer none of them can live up to, the legend, the myth. Su-Ann is a good slayer and she’ll make it far, but Buffy doesn’t need to breathe down her neck, to make her insecure.

Insecure means dead.

So she declined. She’s actually come to sort of like these bars, these quiet, miserable birthdays. They’re better than the alternative – knife in gut, desouled boyfriend, lost virginity, vengeance demon curse and, god, whatever else has heaped up in the past thirty-odd years. So much.

She finishes her beer, waves the barkeep down and points at the bottle. Another. He frowns, looking her up and down. This isn’t the sort of place that cares about valid ID, but it does care about people drinking themselves into a coma in the middle of the floor. She’s had too much for someone of her height and weight already.

Isn’t feeling it.

She scowls and he frowns harder and she sighs because he’s going to cut her off and that means she’ll have to get up, walk out, find herself another watering hole. Or better, a liquor store with a few bottles of the cheap stuff. Too much effort right now.

She’d rather just sit here. So she toasts him with the empty bottle, sardonic little grin on her face and he shrugs, only half apologetic and turns away. Screw him, too.

Just then the door opens and admits a short guy in a trench coat, along with a gust of cool air. Spring in the Midwest. She misses California. She misses the sun. She misses many things and now look at her, here, today, an old woman in a teenager’s –not really - skin, maudlin and nostalgic.

Pathetic.

The guy walks up to the bar, taps it, orders two beers. He moves smoothly, like he’s comfortable in his body. Like he knows it. He smiles briefly at the barkeeper before turning away with the drinks, his expression dropping abruptly. Not that comfortable, then.

Silently and without hurry, he makes his way over to her, slips into the booth opposite her and cocks his head. She shuffles her feet around so they tangle with his, silent comfort. She can feel the heat of his stolen skin through the slacks he’s wearing. It feels good. She doesn’t get touched enough these days.

He shoots one of the bottles over to her and she catches it easily, takes a sip in silent appreciation.

“Like the body,” she says, looking him up and down and settling on his blueblue eyes. Blue like the sky. And beyond it, heaven.

She tries not to think of these things. Twenty is as old as she’ll ever be and heaven is as far out of reach at the past. Haunting, but gone.

“You’re mighty comfy in it.”

Usually he walks stiffer, moves his limbs slower. He alienates people without meaning too, too strange to be passed off as a quirky guy. But this time… this time he looks settled. And the way he ordered those beers…

Someone’s had more success in teaching him than she ever did. She doesn’t mind. She’s not very patient these days.

He looks down his front, touches his tie in an almost human tick. “This body is…mine. The soul it belonged to has passed on.”

Another one burned, she thinks and raises her bottle. She’s surprised when he mirrors her, clinks his against hers. The glass makes a quiet sound that rings in her ears for a moment, then fades away. They drink.

“What do you want, Castiel?” she sighs finally, when pretending gets to be too much of an effort.

He cocks his head again, birdlike. At least he hasn’t grown out of that. “I came to wish you a happy birthday. I have been informed that is customary on earth.”

She snorts. “As if it matters.”

She isn’t aging, so what is a birthday except a chance to mark another year of bleakness? She slays, she hunts, she tracks. She tries to teach the latest in an endless string of dying girls and then she watches them fall anyway. Maybe she should start celebrating that day in September instead, the day she crawled out of her grave, her soul newly reattached to her body, courtesy of a certain angel, heeding the call and command of the god Osiris, banging on the doors of heaven. Demanding her release.

Like she was trapped. Like she was kept there against her will.

She should celebrate that day. Maybe with a gun in her mouth. She has never had her head blown off before. Who knows, it might take.

He scowls and it takes her a moment to identify the expression as concern. From an angel. Wow. Now she knows that she needs help.

“I am deeply sorry,” Castiel says, and he actually sounds like he means it, hands flat on the table, like a school boy getting scolded. He looks guilty, now.

She shakes her head. “Not your fault.”

It’s time’s fault, really. It just keeps running for everyone else and ignoring her like she’s in timeout for being naughty.

“I am the one who cast you down into this second life you despise. For that I am sorry.”

“Not your fault,” she says, because it isn’t. Because he came down from heaven for her, to check on her, to help her, when he shouldn’t have. She’s known him for thirty years now, and he’s only ever tried to do right by her. To help her. His face changes all the time, but he’s still the only constant she has anymore. Well, beside violence and her own face, both of which are as unchanging as the world she stands on. “You’re just the guy who drew the short straw and had to deal with the pagan god screaming at the gates because my friends don’t know the meaning of letting go.”

He smiles. He actually smiles.

She cocks her head, mirroring his favorite bit of body language. “You’ve changed.”

He ducks down, eyes on the tabletop. “I have… spent a very informative year.”

She wants to ask him what the hell that’s supposed to mean when the door opens again and two men come rolling in, all coiled muscle and tension. Violence in two hot, tall, dark packages. But damn. Anyone else in the bar looks up and then dismisses them, but Buffy knows better. This much strength, this much awareness, and all the weapons tucked away under their heavy clothes tell her to not ever dismiss those two.

They grab a beer each, then look around, zeroing in on her and the angel immediately. She watches them move across the room and murmurs, “You’ve been hanging around hunters.”

He smiles again and she finds him criminally pretty as he does it in this body, _his_ body. The first one that’s really his own. Before she’s always looked at him and seen the people sleeping in their own chests, unaware and dead to the world. She knows, technically, that someone died for Castiel to have this body, but she can’t see the soul moving under the skin. On impulse she reaches across the table and traces a finger from his temple to his nose, then down around his mouth. She taps his chin just as the two newcomers reach their table.

“Wow, Cas,” the shorter one drawls, amused look on his face, “Picking up chicks now?”

Slayer and angel share a little grin, thirty years of bumpy friendship and choppy conversation between them, secret and private. Then Buffy drops her hand and scoots farther into the boot to let the hunters sit. She gets the taller one, while the mouthy one slips in with Castiel – Cas. Their expressions turn grim and she almost smiles at that because the angel had just about pulled her out of her birthday funk when the long faces came in.

Too good to last. Always is.

“So who’s dying?” she asks, stretching her legs under the table, nudging Castiel again. “And who are you guys?”

“Sam,” the tall one says with a lopsided grin. He looks tired and far older than her, which he’s not. He nods at mouthy, adds, “My brother, Dean. And dying? Pretty much everyone.”

Castiel, a much more familiar, grave expression on his face, explains, “The world is ending. Lucifer walks free.”

She sighs. “Of course it is. It’s my goddamn birthday.”

Dean snorts, but Sam glowers a bit. He gets points for intimidation. Would, if he weren’t a puppy. How old is he? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight at most. She vaguely remembers being twenty-eight. It sucked as much as fifty does.

“This is serious,” he snaps.

She rolls her eyes, takes a sip of her beer. “Christian apocalypse. How’s that different from the demonic ones, or the hell god one, or the Hindu one last year, or the Egyptian one ten years ago? Or the Norse one?” she bites her lip, grins at Castiel, way too brightly. “At least that one was fun. Thor is one buff hunk of a god.”

Castiel makes a sound that might be a laugh, remembering, probably, the chaos Buffy caused during her two week stay in Asgard.

The hunters’ eyes get big and she shrugs. “There’s always an apocalypse. And somehow, the world always keeps turning. What’s different this time?” she directs the last at Castiel.

He takes a long swallow, almost like he can actually get drunk from it and puts the bottle down heavily. “We have no weapon strong enough to defeat the devil.”

Ah. “And here I thought you were just here to wish me a happy birthday.” She pouts and because she looks like a teenager, it works.

On Dean at least, who gives her a long, hot look and then abruptly turns to his booth-buddy to ask, “How’s she going to help us anyway, Cas? She looks like she’s twelve.”

Right. Might have riled her thirty years ago. Maybe even twenty. Not going to work now. She simply glares at him and then says tonelessly, “I’m the weapon, kid.”

Castiel breathes a sigh of relief. It’s going to take time to get used to this new, almost human Castiel. The one who doesn’t pull back when she touches him but leans into it. She thinks she can probably manage that, even if she’s a bit bummed that it wasn’t her who taught him all his new tricks.

“You will help us then.”

“Have I ever turned you down?” And then, because that’s mostly rhetoric, “I’ve killed gods. Why not add the devil to my list?”

The hunters look a bit disbelieving, but she’s used to that. Used to so many things. What the hell. She’s turning fifty today, looking like she’s eighteen, when really, she’s twenty.

Twenty is as old as she’ll ever be.

She died and went to heaven and came back and kept fighting, because it’s all she has. It’s all she knows. Three things that never change: The violence in her life, her face, and the angel across from her.

He nudges her foot under the table and she smiles and still feels bitter, but it’s better. It’s always better when there’s something to do.

She’s good at this, so she’ll keep doing this until the earth falls into the sun or something finally manages the impossible magic trick and kills her dead. It’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing.

Sam and Dean move after words exchanged with Castiel. Words she misses. Angelboy offers her a hand up and she takes it, lets him pull.

“Let’s go,” she says.

+


End file.
